Many people write out lists of New Year’s resolutions to try to become a better person: Eat less. Give more. Stop swearing. Start vacuuming behind the couch. And a new one for 2017, ‘When they go low, we go high.’

But what if you take pen to paper to record your resolutions, put them on the fridge, open the fridge for a (tiny) piece of cheddar, close the door and can no longer read what you wrote? Might be time to add ‘Improve penmanship’ to your list.

You may ask why bother — who writes when you can type, or just send a GIF — but the art of penmanship ain’t dead yet. A quick search of Pinterest and Instagram shows loads of people are busy writing out lines of “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”

People have been using that pangram (a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet) since the 1850s to practise their writing and typing skills. In 1963, it was the first message the U.S. sent to the Soviets on the hotline the enemies set up after almost nuking us all over the Bay of Pigs. The Kremlin is said to have written back with a query about jumping foxes and a poem about a sunset over Moscow.

Later this month, right around the time we celebrate National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23, love poems will start flying between the White House and the Kremlin and you can be forgiven for ditching the brown fox to write “Pretty please with sugar on top put down Twitter and start taking intelligence briefings.” It misses some of letters but it captures the angst.

Thousands of years ago, the Sumerians started chipping letters into clay tablets and our written communication has been evolving ever since.

“We’ve had three great revolutions in the history of writing,” says Anne Trubek, the author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. “One was the invention of writing in the first place, the second was the printing press and this is the digital age so people will look back and say ‘Yeah, all these things happened when the computer was invented.’”

Those things include governing by tweet and the poo emoji.

Somewhere between the Sumerians and the emojis, cursive came along to speed up the process of writing — all those loops and lines between letters mean you don’t have to raise the quill, or ballpoint, from the paper. Different styles have come and gone, writes Trubek.

The “effeminate” Spenserian and all its curlicues were edged out in the late 1800s by the “more muscular and masculine” Palmer Method, which also claimed to make better Christians, assimilate immigrants, reform delinquent children and improve workers’ productivity. No wonder it had such a good run, lasting until the 1950s when a couple new kids showed up on the cursive block. Eventually, and perhaps tellingly, a cursive style called Handwriting Without Tears (HWT for short) hit notebooks in the 1970s.

I have no idea what we were taught in school but I have pink childhood diaries that prove I did have legible handwriting at one point. As a teenager, I remember changing from cursive to crude to forge my sister’s friend’s signature to get fake ID. As an adult I cling to those stories that say messy handwriting is a sign of creative genius.

If you believe the National Pen Company, your handwriting can reveal 5,000 different traits about you — from your level of ambition to your blood pressure. Trubek doesn’t put much stock in graphology. “It’s a pseudo-science that was a developed around the turn of the 20th century,” she tells me. “But it can be a fun parlour game.”

She’s also not a big fan of throwing around judgment based on your handwriting.

“For a long time in Europe and America it has been a marker of class and prestige for men to have messy handwriting—you’re too busy to worry about such mundane practical matters,” Trubek says. “On the other hand, if you think of a woman who has very rounded neat handwriting you might judge her as less intelligent.”

Unless you’re me and then you would think her smart as a whip because she can actually read her grocery list instead of standing in the produce section staring blankly at the hieroglyphs scrawled on the back of an envelope.

Trubek is a chicken scratcher too, but it doesn’t bother her. “There’s no shame in it,” she says. “You should feel no guilt.” I’ll go with that. Who needs to start off the year feeling guilty. It’s better to save it up for the end of the year when you’ve blown all your resolutions. But then again I’m not sure they count if you can’t read your writing.

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